.NET Services is designed to make connectivity a lot simpler but not at the expense of security. Administrators can control what goes through (as you've found out!). As far as accessing machines goes, I think .NET Services is cooler than Live Mesh. You can
create full-fidelity, bi-directional socket connections over the Service Bus. This means you can do things like remote connections (RDP), sql management, SSH, SNMP, and so on, between any two machines across all kinds of networking infrastructure. Once developers
understand what it does they get incredibly excited. The potential is enormous.